Application Development Life Cycle

An application development life cycle is a process which establishes a set of policies and controls for managing an application's development from conceptualization to retirement. Where the software development life cycle (SDLC) largely focuses on optimizing activities during development and testing, life cycle management extends until end-of-life. Throughout this process, ALM relies heavily on efficiency to maintain a project’s momentum while keeping workgroups aligned.

DevOps Streamlining Development

DevOps aggregates application development and systems operations within a control process or group. This agile model enables teams to develop, test, and deploy projects more rapidly while working toward product quality, performance, and security goals.

DevOps streamlines the Application Development Life Cycle (ADLC) with an integrated view across all stages, including:

1. Design
2. Requirements Gathering
3. Development

4. Testing
5. Deployment
6. Maintenance

These activities – particularly those related to development, testing, and deployment – take place on a frequent basis. This enables continuous delivery, a model which enhances developer productivity, accelerates time-to-market, augments development teams’ flexibility, and lessens the costs of remediation.

Open Source in the DLC

While you may not be making open source software, your development teams are likely using open source components in their projects. A recent Gartner report found open source components in greater than 95% of all mission-critical applications and over 30% of most organizations’ total code base. The very traits of open source make it optimal for agile development – broad selection, ready access, and rapid innovation. However, the use of open source can also become a liability if not managed effectively.

Many organizations have little or no control over their open source, while others create complex, manual processes to track and manage the components they use. Neither approach is scalable or reliable. Proper tracking through manual process is time consuming, and developers are still able to introduce components into projects without approval or tracking of any kind. This exposes you to significant risk of license compliance violations and the introduction of vulnerable open source components into critical projects, putting both sensitive data and intellectual property in harm’s way.

Without a complete account of open source components in your code, identification of vulnerabilities is difficult, if not impossible. In short, you are setting yourself up to be blindsided by vulnerabilities you don’t know you have.

Automating Open Source Management

Automated solutions for Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) simplify and streamline activities associated with tracking open source components in your active development projects. With OSRM solutions, like those from Black Duck, your development teams can:

Accurately detect and catalog open source components into a complete open source Bill of Materials (BOM)

Automatically map the open source components to current known vulnerabilities

Prevent vulnerable open source components from entering your code and remediate vulnerabilities early in the ADLC

Alert development and security teams to newly published vulnerabilities affecting the open source BOM

Black Duck Hub allows your development teams to focus on an agile ADLC, continuous deployment, and software maintenance, throughout the life of the application and without sacrificing security or lengthening timelines.